If you’ve been waiting to finally see Monsanto – one of the most hated companies in the world – to pay for its ecocide, knowing harm of human life, and devastation of our pollinators, then you won’t have to wait much longer. Several activist groups joined by food and farming experts are suing Monsanto for their crimes against humanity. [1]
Finally, Monsanto, the US-based, transnational company responsible for introducing multiple genetically modified crops and numerous toxic chemicals into our environment – including saccharin, aspartame, polystyrene, DDT, dioxin, Agent Orange, petroleum based fertilizers, recombinant bovine growth hormones (rGBH), Round Up (glyphosate), Lasso (an herbicide used in Europe), Bt toxic plants, and more – will have to answer to the world for its reign of terror. Monsanto has acted with severe negligence, and the hubris and supremacy of a corporation given personhood, but no longer.
The Organic Consumers Association (OCA), IFOAM International Organics, Navdanya, Regeneration International (RI), and Millions Against Monsanto, along with dozens of global food, farming, and environmental justice groups announced at the United Nations conference held recently in Paris that an international court of lawyers and judges will assess Monsanto’s criminal liability for their atrocious acts.
The court, in The Hague, Netherlands, will use the UN’s ‘Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights’ developed in 2011 to assess damages for Monsanto’s acts against human life and the environment.
The court will also rely on the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court in The Hague in 2002, and it will consider whether to reform international criminal law to include crimes against the environment, or ecocide, as a prosecutable criminal offense.
This International Criminal Court, established in 2002 in The Hague, has determined that prosecuting ecocide as a criminal offense is the only way to guarantee the rights of humans to a healthy environment and the right of nature to be protected.
Speaking at the press conference, Ronnie Cummins, international director of the OCA (US) and Via Organica (Mexico), and member of the RI Steering Committee, said:
“The time is long overdue for a global citizens’ tribunal to put Monsanto on trial for crimes against humanity and the environment. . . Corporate agribusiness, industrial forestry, the garbage and sewage industry and agricultural biotechnology have literally killed the climate-stabilizing, carbon-sink capacity of the Earth’s living soil.”
The proceedings will take place on World Food Day, October 16, 2016. SOURCE
Bt Lenore Taylor, Guardian Australia, reposted from The Guardian, Dec 4, 2015
At the end of the first week of the talks, there are still huge divisions between countries on all the key points. The French formally take over running the meeting on Saturday when negotiators hand over the text of what they’ve managed to agree so far. At the moment they haven’t agreed very much, despite a myriad of meetings lasting late into the night to try to find consensus on each point.
There is a big dispute over whether the agreement should be aiming to limit global warming to 2 degrees, or 1.5 degrees, in line with the latest science, for example. Small island states, at risk of inundation, are digging in on 1.5 degrees, along with other countries. But nations like Saudi Arabia and India are adamant it should not be mentioned. Countries are also at loggerheads over whether all should eventually have to properly report their emissions and track progress towards their national target, something that’s pretty important in an agreement that won’t be legally binding and won’t contain any sanctions.I wrote about this disagreement here.
Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, has now appointed a bunch of high level officials to try to crunch agreements before the text is handed over at noontomorrow. The foreign ministers and other high level officials take over the negotiating for the final, critical week. It’s supposed to be done by next Friday, but these things seldom finish on time….
Here’s today’s reading list, with a few extra long reads for the weekend
The landmark survey commissioned by the Broadbent Institute is the first study of its kind and size to measure Canadians’ attitudes about voting system design and preference for electoral reform. The research, conducted by Abacus Data, found Canadians want the new government to keep its promise to change the voting system by an almost two to one margin and a larger margin prefers a proportional system to ranked ballots. Voting with a preferential ballot would have produced an even larger false majority in the 2015 Canadian General Election, the study also found.
Broadbent: This is the moment to renew our democracy
The Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings is shown through the Centennial Flame on Parliament Hill in Ottawa . THE CANADIAN PRESS
By Ed Broadbent, reposted from the Ottawa Citizen, Dec 2, 2015
When I returned to electoral politics in 2004, I felt optimistic about the historic opportunity before parliamentarians to change Canada’s outdated and unfair electoral system. That system – single member plurality or “first past the post” (FPTP) as it is commonly known – had been in place for more than 100 years – before women were persons under Canadian law and long before First Nations had the right to vote.
A decade ago, the time for change was already long overdue. But like every previous attempt at reform, this effort in 2004 never got off the ground. Paul Martin’s government failed to implement a strongly worded report from a House of Commons committee that would have advanced the initiative. This failure to address the most glaring part of Canada’s democratic deficit and bring us in line with most of the world’s democracies was a great disappointment.
I am no longer a parliamentarian. And despite working on electoral reform for many years, I know a breakthrough with this Parliament is finally in the cards. The 338 men and women representing Canadians in the 42nd Parliament can finally modernize our antiquated electoral system.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised that the 2015 general election will be the last using our current system – with a specific commitment to introduce legislation to enact electoral reform within 18 months. Trudeau has cited proportional representation and ranked or preferential ballots as possible options.
With such a commitment before us, this is Canada’s moment to rise above partisanship and work together to fix the serious flaws in the most fundamental component of a democratic government: the way our representatives are elected.
To help start this important national dialogue and inform collective deliberations as Parliament returns Thursday, the Broadbent Institute canvassed the opinions of Canadians to provide guidance through a substantial baseline of evidence on their views on possible electoral systems.
This is the first study of its kind and size to measure Canadians’ attitudes about voting system design and preference for electoral reform. Abacus Data’s large sample of 2,986 Canadians allowed for robust estimates across regional, demographic and political subgroups and allowed, with increased precision and riding breakdowns, estimates of what the 2015 Canadian General Election would have been if run under different electoral models.
The data reveal Canadians’ desire for change and for the Liberal government to make good on its election promise. Among other important findings, the data show that Canadians value the principle of proportionality more than the majoritarian principle implicit in a preferential ballot, and a system of proportional representation is far more popular than ranked ballots.
We also discovered there’s a real danger of getting reform wrong by swapping a flawed system for a variation that risks producing even larger false majorities than we have today. Our study shows that ranked ballots can allow a party to obtain many more seats without any more support across the country, thus skewing the results even more than under our current FPTP.
In a democracy, there’s nothing more fundamental than ensuring our voting system is fair and just, thus resulting in a Parliament that accurately reflects how citizens voted. We have impartial courts and the rule of law, a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a vibrant civil society and an independent press, but our electoral system fails the democratic test. The FPTP system is an outdated, non-representative, conflict-prone, gender discriminating, regionally divisive mess, bestowed to us from a pre-democratic era.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Canada’s electoral system worked reasonably well for a young country with only two national parties competing for power. But modern Canada is nothing like the Dominion of Canada of 1867. We have a robust multi-party democracy that requires a matching electoral system.
FPTP is fundamentally undemocratic. It provides false majorities in which a party with the minority of votes nationally can win an absolute majority of seats in the House of Commons. Similarly, whole provinces or regions can end up with MPs of only one party; thousands who voted for other parties go unrepresented.
Among OECD countries, Canada is one of only three who continue to cling to the outdated FPTP system. The vast majority of OECD countries use some form of proportional representation.
Perhaps the most impartial and comprehensive study of our electoral system was done by the Law Commission of Canada. Its Voting Counts: Electoral Reform for Canada in 2004 linked Canada’s “democratic malaise” to the existing system for being “overly generous” to the party that wins a plurality of the vote, allowing it to use its “artificially swollen” majority to dominate the political system. The Law Commission called for systematic democratic reform.
Having elected a government that promised to fix our system, Canadians now expect a broad, cross-partisan dialogue on electoral reform to be launched. The Broadbent Institute’s large-scale survey is a great place to start that much-needed conversation.
Ed Broadbent is Chair of the Broadbent Institute (www.BroadbentInstitute.ca).
Climate change is the greatest existential threat facing our planet, and the only way to rise to a challenge of this magnitude is to end our reliance on fossil fuels. But what should a post-carbon economy actually look like?
In this dispatch from the Paris Climate Conference, Naomi Klein explains that a truly sustainable economy is one that reduces inequality and ends our global crisis of injustice. That’s why Klein and a wide array of musicians, directors, actors, authors, community leaders, and dozens of organizations have created a manifesto that outlines how to do just that in her native Canada.
Naomi Klein at the Canadian launch of her Leap Manifesto in September. Reuters/Mark Blinch
by Peter Burdon,Senior lecturer, Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide, reposted from TheConversation, Dec 4, 2015
Discussions at the Paris climate talks take place within incredibly narrow parameters. In fact, it would not be too great an exaggeration to say that the summit’s main purpose is to send the private sector a message about which way it should steer its future investments.
The financial press tends to be the most explicit on this point. The Financial Times, for instance, described the purpose of the Paris summit like this:
Investors will need to be persuaded that governments are going to make it easier for them to make money from a new electric bus system or a wind farm rather than a highway or a coal power plant.
I am under no illusion about the scale of business investment required to help developing countries move to low-carbon energy sources.
But by narrowing the conversation to neoliberal, market-based solutions, we risk ignoring other opportunities for social and environmental change. This is particularly true under the current state of emergency in France, which has silenced alternative or opposing voices.
These concerns are shared by the Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein, who this week (alongside her compatriots, the film-maker Avi Lewis and author Maude Barlow) came to Paris to present her Leap Manifesto – featuring strategies for a just transition away from fossil fuels.
Lewis opened proceedings by noting, “there is a huge gap between what we are offered by political leaders and what we are ready for in terms of bold and radical change”, before Klein added:
I refuse to leave our future in the hands of world leaders cloistered in Le Bourget [the location of the climate conference]. People are ready to leap and lead. We need politicians who are ready to listen and follow.
The Manifesto
Klein described the manifesto as a “nuts-and-bolts policy document” that seeks to bring together diverse movements to fight for a “justice-based transition away from fossil fuels”. The document itself is an example of this approach, having been drafted by 60 representatives from Canada’s indigenous nations, faith groups, environmental groups and the labour movement.
It contains several substantive ideas, including respecting indigenous rights, giving the public control of energy systems, funding clean transport, ending fossil fuel subsidies, and scrapping laws that prevent attempts to rebuild local economies and stop damaging extractive projects.
With respect to the energy transition, Klein underlined the importance of programs that empower first nations communities to own and control local initiatives. Citing positive examples from Alberta’s tar sands region, she argued that transition can be a “concrete way to fight climate change while addressing historical wrongs”.
Canada’s newspaper of record, The Globe and Mail, described the ideas as “madness”, although at the time of writing the manifesto has attracted more than 31,000 pledges of support, not to mention being well supported by scientific evidence.
But at her presentation, Klein took issue with the idea that climate justice is a fantasy to be derided by hard-headed realists, saying:
This has things in reverse. Doing everything we can to reduce emissions is hard-headed realism. Doing nothing is fantasy.
Is 2016 the ‘leap’ year?
While the manifesto makes concrete policy demands, it should also be viewed as an example that seeks to inspire communities around the world to develop their own statements that address their own circumstances.
This is important, because it has meant that groups of people have organised and worked cooperatively to identify tangible solutions to their specific problems. Those people have ownership of the manifesto and a particular understanding of its meaning that matches their own unique history and geography. They also have practice in building networks of solidarity and participating in a positive project that is not simply responding to a crisis.
Klein is aiming to brand February 29, 2016 as “International Leap Day”, saying:
Leap years are a great metaphor because we change our human system in deference to the Earth’s revolution around the Sun … It shows that it’s easier to adjust human-created laws than it is to change the laws of nature.
We do not need to leave solutions to politicians who have already shown their lack of ambition about reducing emissions, nor to the greenwashedsponsors of the Paris summit. We also do not have time for small, incremental steps towards fixing the climate.
Rather, as Klein argued “we are living in a historic moment that demands audacity and vision … it’s time to turn the world right side up, its time to leap”. SOURCE
By Editorial, reposted from iPolitics, Dec 4, 2015
The Liberal government should meet with the National Energy Board soon if it’s serious about reforming the arm’s-length energy regulator.
The reason for this urgency is the revelation by iPolitics’ reporter Elizabeth Thompson that the Harper government appointed 49 people — four at the NEB — to terms that actually begin after the end of its own term in office. This means Prime Minister Justin Trudeau won’t be able to appoint any temporary members until May 2018 and any permanent members until January 2020 – well after his own term ends.
The sneaky move could set the Liberal government and the NEB up for a cage match, given the mandate changes Trudeau has promised to make at the Calgary-based board. The Conservatives made drastic changes at the NEB just as the body was overseeing the licensing process for contentious pipelines like Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway project, Kinder Morgan Inc.’s Trans Mountain expansion and TransCanada’s Corp.’s Energy East project. The reforms triggered a massive backlash and put the NEB under a spotlight like never before, leading opposition parties — including the Liberals — to promise their own changes.
Having Conservative appointees in charge of the NEB for pretty much the entire Liberal term doesn’t need to mean trouble if the board members believe their jobs are based on merit and not on keeping the agenda of a past government alive. But that’s a big ‘if’ in the contentious world of energy regulation. There’s plenty of reason to suspect the Liberals’ plan could be hindered. Meeting the board members soon would be the best way to create a strong relationship.
The Liberals could forge ahead with their platform just by passing legislation, thereby forcing the NEB to follow the law. This is a good but imperfect reason to hope that things will run smoothly.
When the Conservatives changed the NEB mandate, they did so by adding and striking sections of the National Energy BoardAct. For example, fewer electrical projects now require public hearings, while the need to consider projects’ environmental impacts was removed from the act. The Conservatives also made participation in public hearings conditional on whether someone is directly affected by a project.
The Liberals could do the same thing, of course. During the campaign, they promised to add downstream impacts on the climate to the list of factors the NEB must consider when licensing a pipeline. That means a hearing would have to consider greenhouse gases that enter the atmosphere when the pipeline’s contents are being burned — not just the emissions generated by the pipeline’s construction (which are minimal).
The NEB would have no choice but to follow the letter of the law. But not everything comes down to legislation. After the Conservative reforms were made, there was evidence the board changed the rules on its own without legislative amendments. During hearings on Kinder Morgan’s planned Trans Mountain pipeline in November 2014, a veteran of the energy industry pointed out that the NEB stripped the public of the right to an oral examination of the company’s plans and rejected many questions raised by intervenors. These actions severely impeded the quasi-judicial powers of the boards, said Marc Eliesen, a former president and CEO of BC Hydro.
There is no record suggesting this change was made by Conservatives in Ottawa — meaning the board itself has broad powers to change and restrict its mandate. According to an NEB spokesperson at the time, the NEB simply did not think the project deserved an oral cross-examination despite its size and public profile. So the Liberals can’t simply give the NEB marching orders. They need to have board members on side.
The Liberals face a conundrum in assessing the situation at the NEB. They promised to reverse a change to the command structure of the regulator put in place by the Conservatives, which effectively left the power to approve or reject a pipeline in the hands of the Natural Resources minister. Beforehand, the regulator didn’t necessarily have the final word, but the procedure gave it much more power in determining what a license looks like at the end of the process.
Having the minister at the top of the decision-making process gives Trudeau and his cabinet some clout if things don’t go the way they hope with the NEB. But before breaking its promise, the Liberals should start by determining whether the NEB can fall in line with their platform by discussing their plans with board members.
Thursday on the conference grounds of the COP21 climate talks in Paris, the Canadian Youth Delegationcriticized Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for failing to meet with them, saying he only provided a photo opportunity to them and didn’t engage in the substantive climate issues that matter to youth in Canada.
The group chanted “youth want to be heard, not just seen” to a crowd of media and onlookers while holding up signs listing a number of core demands for Canadian negotiators including ending the expansion of the oilsands and implementing the recommendations of the truth and reconciliation commission.
Spokesperson Katie Perfitt said, “we are here to call out the Canadian government for only being interested in taking selfies with Canadian youth…and not actually listening to what we have to say.”
Perfitt said the government’s lack of engagement with youth and frontline community members at the conference has caused “serious concerns about the Canadian government’s ability to develop sound climate policy that is justice based and in line with climate science.”
Video: Carol Linnitt
“We are serious about climate action and we demand real climate action now from the Canada government,” Perfitt said.
The delegation’s additional demands include Canada reaching zero emissions by 2050, putting an end to fossil fuel subsidies, paying a ‘fair share’ in the climate treaty process and supporting indigenous-led renewable energy projects.
Delegation member Aleah Loney said, “we’re here today to pair our faces with our voices and make clear that including youth means hearing what they’re asking for.”
Trudeau failed to meet with members of the delegation, including those officially included in Canada’s COP21 delegation, before he returned to Ottawa for the opening of Parliament. SOURCE
In fact, her understanding of the issues is so broad, she was even featured as a speaker on a 2013 boat cruise organized by conservative pundit Ezra Levant
